inwary/outward journey - part one...

As our quiet time away winds down, I came upon an insight from Thomas Merton that is worth sharing: "The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey." I've known this intellectually for decades, having been a pilgrim intentionally and unintentionally for years. This time around, however, I have a visceral awareness of why this matters to me; the word pilgrimage comes from the Latin peregrinus, meaning "a person wandering the earth in exile,  or someone in search of a spiritual homeland." (Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale." And cuts to the chase.

When we left the USA three weeks ago, what was swimming around inside at first was inchoate: a vague feeling that, like Bob Dylan's Mr. Jones, something was going on all around me, but I didn't really know what it was. Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" feels ominous. He's an angry, young poet with sneering stanza after accusatory stanza falling out into the world about clueless and withered arbiters of a stagnant status quo. My disequilibrium was equally disorienting, but not as menacing as the bard's barbs. It was more muddled than sinister; like driving through fog engulfing a mountaintop that will, in time, unavoidably be burned off by the persistent presence of the sun, who is for some unknown reason currently just meandering to work. My haziness carried the inevitability of fate, minus the current apocalyptic gloom of popular culture.

Like many Americans trying to sort out this moment in time, my reflections at the start of this sojourn were intuitive. Tentative. Trusting but incomplete. But last night the light broke through the darkness as I realized that not only are we collectively experiencing the end of an epoch - with all the vagaries this implies - but I, too, am entering the closing years of my life's work in pastoral ministry - with all its uncertainties as well. I knew something was percolating within when I read David Bentley Hart's introduction to his revised translation of the New Testament. The first followers of Jesus, he reminds us, were certain that, within a generation, the world as they knew it would end with God's Messiah ushering in the heavenly banquet of the beloved community. The kingdom of God would finally be realized on earth as it was in heaven. Two thousand years later, local pastor Maggie Helwig published a collection of sermons, now widely available in independent bookstores across Canada, titled Instructions for the End of the World. I bought them both as well as two new reflections from First Nations elders living above the 40th parallel unpacking their experiences of living into decolonization. Something, indeed, was going on all around me. But it took Cron's Chasing Francis to connect the dots for me:

The era Francis lived in and the one we live in today are very different, but... there are a few interesting parallels. First, Francis lived in the gap between two historical periods - the Middle Ages and the pre-Renaissance days that opened modernity. We're living in the synapse between two moments in history as well: modernity and postmodernity. (NOTE: I will qualify this observation written in 2006 later.)  People in Francis's time felt the anxiety that comes from living in a rapidly changing society that we do today. Another similarity...has to do with the state of Christendom. In Francis's day, the church was hemorrhaging credibility. It was seen as hypocritical, untrustworthy, and irrelevant. Some people even wondered if it would survive. Clergy were at the center of all kinds of sexual scandals. It had commercialized Jesus - selling pardons, ecclesiastical offices, and relics. Sermons were either so academic that people couldn't understand them, or they were canned. Popular songs ridiculing the church and clergy could be heard all over Europe. The laity felt used by the professional clergy, as if they were to serve the institution, not the other way around. The church had become dangerously entangled in the world of power politics and war. Some fringe groups were beginning to say you couldn't be a Catholic and a Christian at the same time. Disillusionment... inspired many to turn to astrologers and other alternative spiritualities. The demise of feudalism and the return of a money economy brought the rise of the merchant class and a ferocious spirit of aggressive capitalism. Greed ran riot in the culture. And to top it all off, Christians were at war with Muslims. (Kron, p. 50)

We, too, each and all of us, socially and personally, are living into the end of an epoch: Fifty years of liberal government, culture, and religion are being challenged and dismantled in the United States - and the chaos is rippling all over the world. What once seemed like the natural, gradual expansion of human rights, freedom, and social tolerance is no longer a shared national commitment. Canada's Prime Minister, Mark Carney, recently articulated what this end of the epoch means in clear, sober, and realistic terms. Kron then adds what I have been stumbling into and towards: living boldly as a fool for Jesus and his love. St. Francis:

...didn't criticize the institutions of his day, nor did he settle for doing church the way it had always been done. He rose above the obvious alternatives and decided that the best way to overhaul something was to keep your mouth shut and simply do it better.

He simply trusted love. He sang to flowers. He befriended wolves. He offered healing to beggars without pauperizing or enabling them. He embraced the sun, the moon, and the stars. And loved others like Jesus loved him - and that is where I find myself all these years later.